David Little: Rumors get a big boost from technology

I can't really be sure of the timeline because we mostly ignored them. But the calls were all some variation of this conversation:

"Why haven't you written anything about the five girls murdered in Oroville?"

"It's a rumor. It didn't happen."

"How do you know?"

"Because we would know."

"No you wouldn't, because the police are trying to cover it up."

Our folks had similar email exchanges with readers.

I told our local news editor and reporter not to waste any time chasing rumors, until we got enough of those calls and emails that we did check — mostly just so we could tell those people, "We checked with police. There's no serial killer on the loose."

And still some people wouldn't believe it. Because they saw it on Facebook.

Welcome to information sharing in the new millennium. It's the modern version of passing around rumors in high school, only so much easier. As just like with high school rumors, it's almost impossible to find out where the rumor started. The answer is the same in either case: "Oh, I'm not repeating a rumor. I'm just saying what I heard. You know, to see if it is true."

What's truly dumbfounding, from reading these threads, is that some people actually believe it. Even when others say, "That sounds improbable" or "It's just a rumor," they try to convince themselves that the police are covering it up for some reason, the media are complicit, the city is trying to avoid bad publicity ... whatever the case may be. They're insistent it must be true because, well, it's all over the Internet.

After my initial insistence that we aren't going to write stories debunking rumors, no matter how prevalent they are, I finally acquiesced when reporter Barbara Arrigoni learned that Oroville police and the Butte County Sheriff's Office were actually spending staff time chasing down whether the rumors were true. When the Oroville Police Officers' Association felt compelled to counter with its own Facebook message that there is no serial killer, we decided to write a news story about the whole distasteful episode.

Aside from the fact that the police officers' Facebook post spawned some disbelief ("I don't know what to believe between this post, Facebook, and other sources," said one), there was one other troubling component. Our story about the non-story was the top-read story of the day online.

Sigh.

Is that because people like to read about rumors? Or hoaxes? We could write all kinds of stories about Bigfoot sightings that a lot of people would read, but soon that would color our other news stories in readers' minds. Online message boards like Facebook — just as with word of mouth — don't need to worry about credibility. When "somebody else" posted the information, nobody feels accountable, so people spread rumors by clicking "like" or "share" on a ridiculous comment without thinking of whether they're contributing to the problem.

"I'm not saying it's true. I'm just sharing it ..."

Is this a peek into the future? Maybe. Some people seem to be itching for newspapers and "the media" to die off. It's largely a generational thing. Older people rely on traditional media for information, such as newspapers and television.

But social media is gaining rapidly, and that's not all bad. Some of the work done by citizen journalists in Ferguson, Missouri, last week shows the power of shining a light on an institution that would like to stay in the shadows, away from the prying eyes of the public, away from any sort of accountability.

People who rely on Facebook and word of mouth for their news — because they can't fathom paying for news, thus news has no value — might even miss credibly sourced journalism when it's gone.

But this non-story is about much more than journalism. It's about all of us.

My favorite online comment came from Gwendalen Kell: "This is probably just some social experiment that someone started just to see how far it would go."